What actually happened: North America got a late start in the agriculture game. Indians along some of the major rivers in the interior of casually cultivated little gardens of small-seeded sunflowers, squash and a couple of other crops around their settlements by around 2500 BC. That's about 1000 years after agriculture started in Mexico and Peru. Cities and civilizations were already thousands of years old in the Middle East, China, Egypt, and India. Empires and kingdoms had already been rising and falling. Conquerors had already spread their power across goodly hunks of the world, then died and had their deeds and even their names forgotten. The primitive farmers of interior North America weren't conquerors. As a matter of fact their agricultural system failed to spread to their neighbors, who remained happy enough to stay hunter-gatherers. Agriculture didn't become a major factor in the diets of eastern North America until around 300 BC-not much before the Punic Wars in Europe. By around 800 AD, eastern North America's Indians were on a trajectory that might eventually have led to an Inca/Aztec-level civilization. The Mississippian Mound Builders certainly had some of the characteristics that in other areas eventually led to more sophisticated cultures. They were still at least a thousand years behind the Aztecs and Incas though-maybe more. European diseases and other disturbances ended any chance that they would catch up.

What might have happened: While they got a late start, the early farmers of eastern North America weren't irretrievably behind by 1000 BC. They still had roughly 2500 years to catch up. Let's say that something puts them on a slightly faster trajectory toward a farming-oriented life-style. It could be something as simple as someone important noticing that if you save larger seeds and plant them, next year's crops will tend to bear larger seeds. Cultivated plants tend to get larger seeds as a natural part of their development, but deliberate selection by humans speeds that process up quite a bit. In our time-line the shift to deliberate selection may have taken place around 2-300 AD for one of the now-extinct early Indian crops and around 6-700 AD for sunflowers. At least that's when seed-size growth skyrocketed for the two crops.

Let's say that the shift to deliberate selection comes about 7-800 years earlier in this time-line-around 400 BC. The improvement to their crops quickly increases the productivity of the little gardens, and those gardens take on a greater role in people's lives. The little gardens now require more attention, but also repay that attention with more productivity. The increased productivity of their crops makes the transition to dependence on agriculture quicker than in our time-line. The cultures that quickly develop are not exactly the same as the classic Adena and Hopewell mound-builders of our time-line, but they are close enough that it would take an anthropologist to tell the difference. The major change is that this time-line's Mound Builders reach a given milestone several hundred years before their near-equivalents in our time-line did.

Shifting the trajectory of Indian agriculture back 800 years has some interesting consequences. When corn reaches the area for the first time around 200 AD, the gardens around the littler Mound-builder hamlets have gotten big enough that corn is accepted as a minor crop, though it initially doesn't offer a big enough advantage over local crops to dominate them.

In this time-line, agriculture goes into major expansion mode around 200 BC. Populations have grown enough that resources, including good cropland are getting scarce. Warfare becomes more common and it forces populations to consolidate. Instead of little hamlets with an extended family or two, villages of several hundred people become the norm. In the environment of increased warfare, settlements have to get larger, or they will simply be looted or destroyed by their larger neighbors. While raids had not been unknown before, the economic motives make them more common and deadly.

The transition to farming was a gradual thing. As hunter/gathers got more efficient, they learned how to use wild fruits, grains, and tubers more and more effectively. In some places-usually near floodplains where fish got trapped after floods and were easy to catch in shallow ponds-people were able to stay in the same place for extended periods of time. 

Human activities around their settlements tended to create bare patches in the vegetation. At the same time, people were gathering seeds from wild plants and bringing them to their settlements. Some of those wild plants were what we would call weeds-plants that grow quickly in any bare patch they get to. Any seeds that were dropped tended to result in a little patch of useful weeds around a hunter/gatherer camp. As the hunter-gatherers learned more about their environment, they learned to manipulate it more and more to increase productivity. Controlled burning created more productive environments. Certain weeds, trees and bushes were useful and needed to be encouraged. Others weren't useful and were discouraged. At some point, the hunter-gatherers took the natural next step and started scattering seeds of useful plants in areas where they wanted those plants to grow. Once that happened, the plants quickly started getting more useful. Larger seeds could grow faster than smaller ones, and quickly shade out their competitors, so as seeds were scattered in this manner, they naturally started getting larger and more useful to the people who scattered them. As time went on, hunter/gatherers became farmer-not abruptly but step-by-step. They put a little more energy into their little patches and those patches became a little more productive. The process took thousands of years in eastern North America, and deliberate selection of crop characteristics came late in the process.

Increased use of corn drives the process faster, once corn is adopted. Corn rapidly leaches nutrients out of the soil, and it takes many years for fertility to recover. Farming on floodplains helps some because the frequent floods help replenish nutrients, but even there soil exhaustion eventually occurs. Wild game and even firewood become scarce around the villages too. A pattern of larger settlements further apart from one another develops. Villages move frequently within their territories as resources become locally depleted.

The culture that emerges by about 300 AD is not really Hopewell or Mississippian as they existed in our time-line. Artistically it is much like a more sophisticated Hopewell. Settlement structures and population levels are more like Mississippian, and warfare is much more common than in our time-line's Hopewell.

That increased warfare moves the wide-spread adoption of bows and arrows forward a few hundred years to around 300 AD. That in turn makes warfare more deadly.

In our time-line, agriculture remained pretty much restricted to the central river valleys of North America until around 700-800 AD, or possibly a little earlier. When agriculture did spread, it was usually dominated by corn. In this time-line, the native crops become productive enough to spread out of the central river valley around 100 BC. In our time-line the Hopewell mound-builders had a trade network that stretched from the Atlantic Coast to the Rocky Mountains. In this time-line, a similar network exists, and it promotes the rapid spread of a subset of the native North American crops.

As agriculture spreads, new centers of farming cultures develop, taking some of the already developed crops, adding in a few local food plants that can adapt to agriculture, and making their own unique style of agriculture. By 500 AD, new centers of agriculture have developed along the mid-Atlantic coast between North Carolina and New Jersey, in southern New England, and among the proto-Iroquois tribes from Northern Ohio through upstate New York and southern Canada. Little patches of sunflowers are being grown as far west as California, where they offer a low-risk supplement to the sophisticated hunter-gatherer cultures there. A secondary agricultural center based on a few eastern crops plus several native food plants develops along the Colorado river.

The process of development in eastern North America is not linear. Cultures rise and fall. Populations rise, hit limits, then fall back, at least locally. On the whole though, cultures are becoming more complex and technologically advanced throughout most of North America. As that happens, links between the various cultures grow stronger.

By 1000 AD, both California and the Colorado river valley have become important secondary centers of crop development, though California diets are still dominated by increasingly sophisticated hunting and gathering. In California, the lines between agriculture and wild food gathering are frequently blurry, with the Indians promoting growth of a variety of food plants without technically domesticating them.

In eastern North America, increasingly productive agriculture has allowed craft specialists to develop. Stone and wood carvings become more and more elaborate. Metal working become more sophisticated, though it still involves heating and forming objects of nearly pure metal rather than extracting metal from ore until around 1200 AD, when more sophisticated techniques diffuse from Northeastern Mexico. Cotton spreads from the southwest to some areas of the southeastern US at about the same time, and cotton goods become major items of trade. Increasingly sophisticated political and economic systems increasingly require record-keeping, and systems of record-keeping develop into primitive writing gradually over the period between 1100 and 1400 AD.

Indians have maintained their Mound-building traditions over the centuries, but mound-building has taken on different meanings for different cultures in the area. Along the Mississippi mounds are topped by temples or houses of government. In other areas, they mark the burial spots of society's elite members.

In several places, Indians develop reasonably elaborate boat-building traditions. That's especially true along the Mississippi river, in Northern New England, and along the coasts of Georgia and Florida. The New England designs are influenced to some extent by the example of Viking trade ships that venture into the extreme northern part of the area on a very sporadic basis from around 900 to 1400 AD.  A small-scale indirect trade develops between the Greenland Vikings and some of the tribes north of New England.

Norse metal goods and textiles find their way into North American trade networks in very small quantities. Their scarcity gives them great value.

One recent study of pre-contact California Indian diet found that "A complex of grasses (little barley, maygrass, ryegrass), legumes (Lotus, clover, lupine), and small seeds (goosefoot, chia, tarweed) is present in sites throughout California.(…)Several of these taxa demonstrate morphological changes that suggest some degree of selection or environmental management beyond the simple gathering of a wild plant."

 Indian metal-workers imitate some of the Norse metal goods in copper. The results are often not particularly useful, but they do stimulate use of copper in tools rather than ornaments.

Indian grains and tobacco flow north in small amounts to the Greenland Vikings. The tobacco actually provides the main incentive for the Vikings to keep coming back once its use catches on in Greenland. Small quantities of tobacco reach Iceland starting around 1250 AD and fuel an upturn in voyages from Iceland to Greenland from 1250 AD until the mid-1300's. After that, the cooling climate makes voyages to and from Greenland very difficult, and the trade dwindles to a trickle, though it never entirely stops.

The Vikings have tried to establish settlements or trading posts on the North American coast from time-to-time, but those settlements are short-lived. There is a small amount of gene-flow from the Norse to the Indians, and in a couple of places herds of feral cattle or horses survive and spread after their masters leave.

The tobacco and grain trade does allow the Greenland Vikings to survive a bit longer than they did in our time-line. Both the eastern and western colonies survive long enough to be ravaged in s smallpox epidemic that spreads from Ireland in the 1460's. The epidemic spreads to Eskimos that come to trade with the Vikings in West Greenland colony. From there it spreads to neighboring Indians and then sweeps through most of eastern North America before burning itself out. Around 30 percent of the Indian population of eastern North America dies. That makes it equivalent to an Indian version of Europe's Black Death.

North America's Indian civilization falters a bit, but is well on it's way to recovery when Spanish explorers begin probing the area roughly 50 years later. (This assumes that European history has gone on about as it did in our time-line-not necessarily true, but I'll assume that it has for now and deal with the issue later.)

In the years between the epidemic and Spanish contact, cotton becomes common throughout much of the region. Indian metallurgist learn how to make bronze from this time-line's version of the Huastecs of northeastern Mexico. Power relationships are reshuffled as Indian kingdoms that escaped relatively lightly from the epidemic are suddenly much more powerful compared to hard-hit ones.

And then the Spanish come. The higher level of civilization and higher populations make the southern coast of North America much more attractive to the Spanish than they were in our time-line. There isn't a lot of gold in the area, but there is some from North American sources and a little more is brought into the area by trade with Mexico.

In both time-lines, Florida was actually discovered before the high culture areas of Mexico. In this time-line, Florida becomes the target of a Spanish attempt at conquest starting in 1516. Panfilo Narvaez leads an expedition from Cuba, with Hernando Cortes as one of his lieutenants.

Unfortunately for the Indians, their higher level of civilization makes them more susceptible to Spanish conquest. While there is no single North American empire to be conquered, there are substantial kingdoms whose machinery of government the Spanish can seize and force to do their bidding. The Spanish seize one such kingdom in 1516 and are able to dominate most of central Florida through it for a while.

Eastern North America gets its second taste of smallpox in 1519, as the disease spreads to the West Indies, then to the new Florida colony. Smallpox also spreads to Panama and eventually up Central America to Mexico and south to Peru. North America's second epidemic isn't quite as bad as the first one. A few oldsters are partially immune, and descendents of the people who survived the first epidemic are a little less susceptible than a population which had never faced the disease would have been.

The chaos left by the second epidemic allows the Spanish to extend their control to northern Florida, to the people who in our time-line would have become the Apalachee tribe. The Spanish are also able to command tribute from kingdoms even further north, though control there is tenuous. Cortes commands the expedition to Northern Florida, and establishes himself as a quasi-independent power in that area.

The North American colonies are the place for ambitious Spaniards to be from 1516 to around 1522, when Spanish expeditions moving north from Panama discover the high-culture areas of Mexico. The Florida colonies, along with the Spanish colonies in the West Indies, lose a large part of their populations as ambitious Spaniards converge on Mexico from throughout the area. The remaining Spaniards in Florida split into bitter factions, with Cortes maneuvering to sever his dependence on Narvaez. Narvaez is determined to retain his control of northern Florida, at least partly because his misrule of the central area has driven away or killed enough Indians that the remainder can't support even the remaining Spaniards in the area at the level they have become accustom to. Spanish in the two areas wage a cold war that sometimes even involves slave raids on Indians loyal to the other faction.

Friction between the two factions is a major factor in an Indian revolt in 1524 that kills a couple of hundred Spaniards, including Narvaez and reduces central Florida to an impoverished backwater. Thousands of rebel Indians flee to still unconquered areas of South Florida, hiding out in the swamps and waging guerrilla war on the remaining Spaniards. Northern Florida fares better, but the Spaniards do lose control over tributary groups to their north, and several thousand Indian rebels from the more settled areas flee north, taking looted Spanish goods and knowledge of Spanish ways with them.

The Indians the Spanish have encountered so far in North America are somewhat intimidated by the Spanish, but they are by no means easy to conquer or to retain control of. The Indians are excellent archers. They build formidable fortifications. They quickly figure out how to use terrain to minimize the impact of cavalry.

A large Indian kingdom roughly analogous to our time-line's lower Creeks in Central Georgia has been a prize just outside Spanish control since 1519. That kingdom pays nominal tribute and acknowledges Spanish rule from 1519 to 1522, then becomes increasingly assertive from 1522 to 1524, and plays a major role in the revolt of 1524.

Cortes is trying to put together an expedition to put an end to that assertiveness shortly after the revolt in Florida is put down. At that point, he is called back to Spain to face accusations of fomenting the revolt that killed Narvaez. He becomes embroiled in court politics and is imprisoned for a couple of years.

The two sections of Florida stagnate, as Spanish factions feud over a dwindling supply of Indians in the conquered areas. Aggressive and ambitious Spaniards drift away to the easier, richer pickings in Central and South America. Cortes returns to the New World in time to lead a Spanish expedition to conquer this time-line's version of the Incas in 1530. Florida remains a backwater until the 1540's. There are easier and richer pickings elsewhere. Still unconquered Indians in southern Florida become major raiders of the cattle ranches that begin springing up where climate allows it in central Florida. Spanish slave raids into unconquered areas of the southeast keep Indians hostile.

As in our time-line, the French explore the coast of eastern North America and make some abortive attempts to settle. Those attempts fail because of Indian hostility, and the lack of easily portable wealth. Ships of all European nations explore, trade, fish, and/or loot along the coast. As in our time-line, hundreds-maybe even thousands of Indians are kidnapped or tricked into going with the Europeans for various reasons-as slaves, as curiosities, to be converted, or to be used as interpreters. In this time-line, those Indians are somewhat more hardened to European disease, and more of them make it back to their homelands where they bring with them more sophisticated understanding of European motives and technology.

There is a constant trickle of fugitives from conquered areas to the still unconquered areas-some of them escaped slaves, some of them locals fed up with Spanish rule. Some of those fugitives take Spanish tools, crops and techniques north with them. Florida doesn't attract Spanish craftsmen to any great extent, so the Spanish are dependent on Indian craftsmen to supply many of the things they need to maintain a Spanish lifestyle. That means that Indians learn a subset of Spanish building, metallurgy, and many other techniques. Some of those Indian craftsmen then find their way to still independent Indian states, where their skills are in great demand. Primitive iron-working becomes common in some parts of the southeast. Indian-made iron axes and knives become sought-after commodities-not as prestigious as European-made ones, but more useful to the Indians because they are common enough to actually be used rather than just hoarded.

Crops head north too, especially easy ones like peach trees and watermelons. Horses strayed or stolen from Spanish Florida become rare but valuable status symbols for Indian rulers. Feral herds left over from the Viking settlements in the Northeast become a secondary source of horses for those rulers. Herds of pigs become common around Indian towns and villages through most of Eastern North America.

Diseases keep spreading into the area-measles, mumps, malaria, and new smallpox epidemics. The denser populations and better communications in this time-line mean that diseases spread all the way to New England and deep into the plains once they get a foothold. By the 1540's, eastern North America has already had 80-odd years of exposure to New World diseases, and while those diseases are still deadly, Indian populations are already starting to bottom out in some places. The diversity of their agricultural base makes the Indians of this time-line somewhat less susceptible to famines following epidemics. Crops mature at different times so missing a harvest or planting time due to an epidemic is not quite as deadly as it was in our time-line. The more diverse diet also means that this time-line's Indians are somewhat better off nutritionally than ours were, and that translates into somewhat better survival rates in an epidemic. Even with all of those advantages, the Indian population still shrinks to a little less than half of what it was prior to the first epidemic-with areas closest to Florida down to around thirty percent of their original population. That reduced population is still a little higher than our time-line's Indian population of 1492.

By now, European fishermen are trading with Indians in northeastern North America, and there is a trickle of trade from the Spanish settlements north into unconquered territory. Indian craftsmen are advanced enough to imitate many of the trade goods, but the European goods tend to influence styles even in remote areas of eastern North America.

And that is where I ran out of time. Where do we go from here? Do the Spanish renew their push for conquests in North America? Large settled populations do attract them. Do England, France, and Holland try to colonize the area? If so, how do they deal with a larger, more technologically advanced population that by 1600 will already have reached it's low point from introduced diseases and started back up?

 

 Comments are very welcome.